After twenty years of work, the camera is the heart of the future Vera C. Rubin Observatory arrived at her home last week. It now lies at the top of Cerro Pachón Mountain in Chile.
This camera is the final major component of the Rubin Observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope, where it will be installed after several months of rigorous testing.
Successfully and safely transporting the SUV-sized camera from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, where it was built for the past two decades, to the mountaintop observatory site in the Chilean Andes is no small feat.
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The camera weighs 3 tons and has a diameter of over 1.5 meters. It is the largest camera ever built for astronomy. To minimize the risk to the $168 million eyepiece, scientists and engineers held a “full dress rehearsal” in 2021 by shipping an analogue of the camera’s mass to Chile. The simulator was equipped with data loggers to document the conditions the real thing would experience during the journey.
“Transporting such a delicate piece of equipment around the world comes with many risks. With ten years of assembly work on the camera, culminating in a ten-hour flight and a winding dirt road up a mountain, it was important to get it right to do ,” Margaux Lopeza mechanical engineer at SLAC who led planning for the camera’s shipment, said in a rack. “But because we had the experience and data from the test shipment, we were confident we could keep the camera safe.”
On May 14, the camera was shipped to San Francisco airport for a 10-hour flight to Chile. It flew in one Boeing 747 cargo plane, which landed the next day at Chile’s Santiago International Airport, the closest airport to the Rubin Observatory that could accommodate such a large aircraft.
The next evening, the camera and its convoy of nine trucks were safely inside the guarded gate at the foot of Cerro Pachón. The next morning he traveled for five hours on a winding dirt road, covering 22 miles (35 kilometers) to the top of the mountain, which sits more than 9,000 feet (2,713 meters) above sea level.
“Our goal was to ensure that the camera not only survived, but also arrived in perfect condition,” Kevin Reila scientist from the Rubin Observatory, said in a rack. Inspections after arrival showed that the camera did not encounter any unexpected stresses during the long journey.
“Early indications – including the data collected by the data loggers, accelerometers and shock sensors – suggest we have been successful,” Reil said.
The successful arrival of the camera at the observatory is undoubtedly a relief not only for all the scientists and engineers working on the camera, but also for a generation of astronomers who are eagerly awaiting the first light from the observatory, currently scheduled for late next year to appear.
That’s when the Rubin Observatory – formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope – will conduct a groundbreaking decade-long study of the universe by generating a panorama of the southern sky every few nights, which will catalog approximately 37 billion objects. This survey is called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, after which the camera is named.
“Getting the camera to the top was the last big piece of the puzzle,” he said Victor Krabbendam, the LSST project manager. “Now that all of Rubin’s components are physically on site, we are on the path to transformative science with the LSST.”
The LSST camera establishes a world record in 2020 when it took the largest shot with a giant digital camera. Scientists say just one of the 3,200 megapixel images would require 378 4K ultra-high-definition TVs. The resolution is so good that in this camera’s portraits a golf ball can be seen from 25 kilometers away.
Using data from the ten-year study, astronomers hope to gather clues about the nature of dark matter dark energy, which together make up more than 90 percent of the mass of our universe, but cannot yet be directly detected. Most notably, the LSST camera will look for and study signs of weakness gravitational lens, a cosmic phenomenon that occurs when a massive galaxy bends or distorts the light from background galaxies. By studying these lens structures, astronomers can map how dark matter is distributed within and around the lens galaxy.
“We expect the observatory to make many discoveries – things we previously didn’t even know existed,” director Vera C. Rubin Steven Kahnan astrophysicist at Stanford University in California, previously told Space.com.